Articles

Anyone who has still not yet understood the utter cynicism of the Obama administration in general, and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular, should look at the Justice Department's latest interventions in education.

If there is one thing that people all across the ideological spectrum should be able to agree on, it is that better education is desperately needed by black youngsters, especially in the ghettoes. For most, it is their one chance for a better life.

Among the few bright spots in a generally dismal picture of the education of black students are those successful charter schools or voucher schools to which many black parents try to get their children admitted. Some of these schools have not only reached but exceeded national norms, even when located in neighborhoods where the regular public schools lag far behind.

Where admission to these schools is by a lottery, the cheers and tears that follow announcements of who has been admitted -- and, by implication, who will be forced to continue in the regular public schools -- tell the story better than words can.

The Golden Globes is the notorious kickoff to Hollywood’s “awards season” during which rich people gather in large well-appointed rooms to drink expensive champagne and give each other tokens of their undying admiration, which they will all discuss at cocktail parties you’ll never be invited to. And as Americans, we like it that way, especially when, as at the Golden Globes, those same people are encouraged to drink heavily during the broadcast.

This year’s Globes began, as they often do, with a river of sludge winding its way slowly down a plush red carpet into the Beverly Hilton. That was, of course, cleaned up quickly, and a separate river of sludge was able to, once again, continue unimpeded into the hotel’s ballroom, as E! Online rolled B-roll footage and regaled the early audience with “fun facts” about the celebrities they were seeing, like that one time that Michael J. Fox was hilariously diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

The Senate isn’t known for its candor. Politicians tend to respond to even the most penetrating question with a warmed-over string of mawkish clichés cooked up by a pack of slimy consultants sitting in a K Street conference room and carefully steered through a gauntlet of sunlight-deprived focus groups. Ask your typical Republican senator his opinion on, say, allegations of improper NSA surveillance of our allies, and his answer will sound something like this:

We need to make sure that the NSA can do its job to prevent every terrorist attack, while also respecting the privacy of every solitary American. I’ve talked to my constituents back home and they’re sick and tired of these special interests corrupting our politics. They know that this great country was founded on freedom and that freedom isn’t free. Also, Ronald Reagan.

Democratic politicians are desperate to make up for Obamacare’s disastrous roll-out. Thirteen states are increasing their minimums this year, and some Democrats believe raising the national minimum wage is a winning campaign issue for November.

It’s hard to predict the impact of new wage proposals on elections ten months hence, though polls suggest that two-thirds or more of Americans back an increase. But there’s no doubt that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment and slow economic growth. Worse, government wage-setting is immoral. It simply is unfair and wrong for politicians to posture as philanthropists while arbitrarily forcing other people to pay higher salaries.

Most of the debate over the minimum wage is practical. What is its impact on employment and price levels? And the answer is clear: the cost of higher wages will be borne in varying degrees by customers, workers, and investors. Exactly who loses how much will depend on conditions in the particular industry.

In Nixonian terms, Robert Gates’s memoir Duty would already be labeled “Gatesgate” if the revelations in it were half as good as the reports of them are. Add to that the dissolution of Iraq, Ed Gillespie’s imminent Senate candidacy and a tinge of GW Bridge envy and you have a lot of SGO for a month that’s only half-over.

(For those just joining us, “SGO” is the comprehensively useful acronym invented by my friend and former SEAL Al Clark. It means “s*** goin’ on” which is as good a shorthand for politics as anyone can devise.)

The Economist seems to have captured the moment in its editorial cartoon this week. In the foreground, de facto Secretary of State Dennis Rodman is handing a “Happy Birthday” balloon to Kim Jong-un. In the background stands Barack Obama asking angrily how he can respond to amateurs messing around in foreign affairs. Next to him stands Bob Gates, saying “You could write a book.”

Well, our progressive friends are once again calling for single payer health care. The ironic pretext this time is that Obamacare has collapsed into chaos. The health care “reform” law they assured us would cure the ills of our medical delivery system is disintegrating before their eyes. But the advocates of the “Affordable Care Act,” as these people stubbornly refer to it, refuse to accept that the crackup was caused by the inevitable incompetence of government bureaucrats. They believe the real problem was avaricious insurance executives.

Political parties’ real electoral danger isn’t overwhelmingly negative public opinion, but opinion clearly and consistently negative. The reason is obvious: Political parties are neither stupid enough — nor long survive — taking hugely unpopular positions. The bad news is Obamacare looks to be the kind of clearly and consistently negative issue that leaves the administration and Democrats damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

The political landscape clearly shows political parties are more likely to face political difficulties from issues that decidedly and consistently run against them. Most contentious issues exist and persist with both parties hovering around majority support for their stances. The environment, tax, and spending — among others — all devolve into stances that leave each party near victory.

The death of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is the final curtain on a long sad drama that began in 2005 when he was felled by a massive stroke. He was a legendary warrior for Israel against its enemies and a genius of tactics and strategy. Arguably it took eight years in a coma to wring the vitality from him. He was a giant and an exemplar for those who believe, as I do, that the Jewish state is a benign democratic outpost of civilization in the Middle East. For all those who think that area of the world would be at peace were it not for Israel, let them explain why practically all of Israel’s neighbors are in internecine conflict there today and only Israel is at peace and prospering. Its peace and prosperity comes in large part from the contributions of Ariel Sharon.

The mystery is solved. So many earnest Republicans were puzzling over Chris Christie and his apparent affinity of the company of President Obama. Now we know the answer. He is cut from the same cloth of dirty politician.

Obama is a brutal punisher of all who dare stand up to his agenda or his party or him. He was only in office a few months and already he was using his leverage over General Motors and Chrysler to shut down successful dealerships for those brands. Why shutter the ones making money at a dire moment in the history of those corporations? Simple. They were owned by Republicans.

When the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United decision allowing campaign contributions by corporations, Obama insulted them in public during his State of the Union address. He could not gain sympathy if he criticized their view fairly, so he misrepresented their position to soften it for the scalpel. Nothing like this had ever been done before in the history of the presidency or of the Court for that matter. Apparently, Obama thought Teddy Roosevelt meant this kind of behavior when he called the presidency a bully pulpit.

The scandal of The George Washington Bridge and Chris Christie is one of the most overhyped political dramas of the last decade. We live in an era where political vindictiveness and a bully government seem ubiquitous—the IRS scandal, TSA, NSA—and gross human error is epidemic—Fast and Furious, Benghazi, Hurricane Katrina. The Christie scandal has gotten coverage due to a slow news week rather than the actual size of the offense.

While this doesn’t bode well for trust in government, the real story is about how the image of Christie has been radically altered in our celebrity culture that builds people up in order to destroy them.

After a crushing defeat by President Obama in 2008, with the further losses of both the House and the Senate, Republicans were in desperate need of a hero. Christie rose through the ranks, winning a governorship in an overwhelmingly blue state, despite a third-party candidate. This gave Republicans their first net gains in governorships since 2003.

Rappers go to extraordinary lengths to hoodwink the public into buying into their gang-banger bona fides. The Insane Clown Posse (ICP) may be the only hip-hop act waging a public relations campaign aimed at demonstrating that they’re not involved in a criminal enterprise.

The ACLU, ICP, and four Juggalos — face-painted followers prone to spraying cheap sodas on one another and shouting “whoop, whoop” — have sued the FBI for classifying them as a “gang.”

What in the name of Violent J gave the feds the insane idea of calling this posse a “gang”?

A lawyer/Juggalo ridicules law-enforcement’s designation as “the equivalent of placing Phish fans on a terrorist watch list.” But what jam-band gypsy has ever attacked a gay bar patron with a hatchet, killed a state trooper, and kidnapped and murdered a woman on a multi-state crime spree, as Juggalo Jacob Robida did in 2006? The manager of ICP, whose record label goes by the nickname “the hatchet,” maintained in the carnage’s aftermath, “Anyone that knows anything at all about Juggalos knows that in no way, shape, or form would we ever approve of this type of bulls#!+ behavior.”

We know it was too good to be true. As he explained in his Checkers speech yesterday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has no idea who Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich is. So much for a Republican playing hard ball with a Democrat. We’re back to the basic model, in which your typical Republican honcho can’t even get Republicans to back him. It’s also probably safe to assume Christie doesn’t know the difference between a Serb and a Croat either. He is after all a Springsteen, not a Bob Dylan, fan.

Incidentally, which of those last two will be the first to compose “The Ballad of Fort Lee”? A city heretofore famous only thanks to Gilda Radner whose captives’ lone escape is via the George Washington Bridge — and who know how long it will remain standing if Gov. Christie ever comes to that bridge and crosses it? Bridgegate is going to be multi-spanned.

Boy, have progressives “evolved.” The party of saloon protesters, suffragettes and crusaders against smoking, prostitution and immigration are now the champions of government-regulated vice.

They no longer want to save souls, but use them to increase tax revenue to fund an ever expanding list of new priorities in a turnaround that would likely make Frances Willard, the famous head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the late 1800s, reach for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

The reversal is not totally consistent, however. No sooner had progressives successfully helped to ban smoking everywhere in public places had they moved on to champion legalizing marijuana.

The anecdote has it that someone once asked Louie Armstrong what jazz was. Satchmo is reported to have something like this in response, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Great answer. There are other questions we sometimes hear, the only response to which is: “If you can even ask that question, there is no answer I can give you that would satisfy or enlighten you.” One of these, and one that always pole-axes me that any sentient adult could ask, is: “Why shouldn’t women serve in combat roles in the military?” The why on this one, at least to anyone with more awareness than that of a cucumber, should be too obvious to detain us, even for a moment. It would take a highly-trained social scientist or a febrile, leftist geek not to understand this one.

Another of these knee-buckling questions we’ve heard at this time last year and this, is: “Why shouldn’t Barry Bonds be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame?” Anyone who can ask this question could as easily ask, “Why shouldn’t we vote Bernie Madoff into the Financial Counselors Hall of Fame?” Heck, Bernie’s customers put up some great numbers — a least for a while.

You know how, sometimes, when somebody says something really funny or clever and you want to tell somebody else about it but you can’t quite remember the exact words or what it was in the context that made it so funny or clever? Anyway, when you say it, it doesn’t sound so clever or funny as when the funny or clever person said it, and you add, rather lamely, “You sort of had to be there”? Well, some such form of words as that ought to have been appended by the Coen brothers to their new movie, Inside Llewyn Davis. They seem to have been counting instead on an audience that was there, or at least that thinks it was there or wishes it had been there, and so is willing to come more than halfway to meet them in their half-hearted attempt to re-create the alleged magic of Greenwich Village in 1961.

The Cambrian Explosion and the Combinatorial Problem

by Stephen C. Meyer

We count on scientists to tell us what they know and don’t know—not just what they want us to hear. But when it comes to the contentious issue of the evolution of life on earth, spokesmen for official science are often less forthcoming than we might wish.

When writing in scientific journals, leading biologists candidly discuss the many scientific difficulties facing contemporary versions of Darwin’s theory. Yet when scientists take up the public defense of Darwinism—in educational policy statements, textbooks, or public television documentaries—that candor often disappears behind a rhetorical curtain. “There’s a feeling in biology that scientists should keep their dirty laundry hidden,” says theoretical biologist Danny Hillis, adding that “there’s a strong school of thought in biology that one should never question Darwin in public.”

When it first emerged that Barack Obama lied about policy cancellations under Obamacare last year, Governor Chris Christie had some advice for the president: “Don’t be so cute,” he told Jake Tapper, “and when you make a mistake, admit it.”

Today, Christie had to practice what he preached. After initially denying that his administration had any knowledge of a suspiciously timed lane closure in Fort Lee, N.J., emails surfaced showing that his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, encouraged a member of the Port Authority to cause “traffic problems.” The closures, allegedly for a traffic study, resulted in massive gridlock on the already torpid George Washington Bridge.

In his Thursday morning press conference regarding “Bridgegate,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie demonstrated the sort of leadership and responsibility-taking that has allowed him to be a popular Republican governor in a very blue state and the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for president (to the dismay of many conservatives).

In short, the scandal revolves around Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, contacting a Christie-appointed Port Authority official named David Wildstein and telling him to cause traffic problems for the town of Fort Lee, NJ. It is believed, though not proven in the e-mails uncovered by the Bergen Record, that the purpose was retaliation against the Mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, for not endorsing Christie in his most recent election.

Perhaps it had to be this way. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Rodman could go to North Korea. The weirdest man for the weirdest country, right?

I am nothing if not a child of the ‘90s, so I vaguely remember Rodman’s time in the NBA, especially his stint in Chicago: the successive rebounding titles, the freakish 72-10 regular season record in ’95-6, the pink hair and piercings. I also remember that on the playground and in gym class whenever someone did something unsportsmanlike — threw a dodge ball at somebody’s back or kicked a soccer ball too hard in the direction of a girl — we would all say, “Don’t be queer like Rodman.” We had no idea what it meant to be queer, but we knew that it had something to do with a man posing in a bridal gown and that it was, distinctly, a Bad Thing.

I wonder whether others my age remember this once-popular insult. It definitely wasn’t indigenous to my elementary school, as I discovered when I heard one of my older cousins employ it (“Pokémon? That game’s queerer than Rodman”). Just a piece of lore for the benefit of oral historians.

The American Spectator Foundation is the 501(c)(3) organization responsible for publishing The American Spectator magazine and training aspiring journalists who espouse traditional American values. Your contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Each donor receives a year-end summary of their giving for tax purposes.